Laity or worldly? How does the village near the Mir Castle live and why do you want to stay here

Solid houses, rare pedestrians and cars... The everyday life of Mir, an urban village in the Korelichi district, at first glance, does not stand out with anything special. The search engine in the phone reminds: about two thousand people live here, the main attraction is the Mir Castle. it suddenly rises in front of us at the turn to the center, majestic and as if unearthly. But we are not going to its towers, popular with tourists, but to the locals - the laity, or, as they call themselves, the worldly. What is it like for them to live in a place where the city-forming enterprise is a castle?

There is only one secondary school for 230 students. The boys greet strangers in a rustic way. We are met by the big and good-natured Valery Brant, a teacher of history and social science, curator of the school museum. Brant looks like a retired epic hero. Once he graduated from the Leningrad Higher Military-Political School of Air Defense, served. In the turning point of 1991, he moved to Mir with his wife and became a teacher.

The school museum is a standard office without desks. In the corners there are sculptures, near the walls there are simple peasant implements of the past: tongs, shovels for baking, axes. On the stands there are old photos, drawings depicting buildings and outfits of the laity. Of the modern exhibits - a flight headset graduate school Dmitry Petrov-Male, whose aircraft crashed in Africa. For many days the pilot walked through the jungle to his own.

Mir anticipated the idea of ​​the Minister of Education of Belarus - to create its own museum in every school in the country. The benefit of the rich history of the village is conducive to this. On the basis of the collected archive, the school creates large presentations, develops test tasks for students. Having tried to pass one of them, we are cut off on the first question. Valery Brant smiles contentedly through his mustache and explains: if we had attended his lessons, the result would have been different. There is nothing outrageous about the tests.

The teacher arranges a virtual historical tour for us. The first mention of Mir (the emphasis is always on the last syllable, as the locals say!) is 1434. The castle began to be built almost a century later, under Yuri Ilyinich. Then the owners of the defensive structure and adjacent territories changed, as in a kaleidoscope: the Radziwills, the Wittgensteins, the Svyatopolk-Mirskys. According to the history of the village, you can study the past of the whole of Belarus.

After the stories of Valery Brant, one gets the impression that there are more famous natives of the World than those living today.

- Worldly people are great pamyarkovy, great racist, tough, unhurried, roof-top ascyarozhny, and ў asnoўnym - kind, - the teacher suddenly switches to "mova", listing the common features of the laity of different generations.

- Duc have chym іh adroznenne hell of astatnіh belarusаў?

- Yanas are the quintessence of Belarusians, - Valery Brant believes.

The school also has another museum room dedicated to the great fellow countryman of the laity, the national hero of Chile, Ignatius Domeiko. In the exposition, in addition to portraits of the scientist and his descendants, there are numerous collections of minerals.

- Three Chilean ambassadors have already been here. One of them presented us with a memo to the rector of the Theological Seminary in Santiago de Chile, written by Domeiko's hand - the teacher carefully picks up a glazed frame with a priceless document. - There is no such autograph even in the Academy of Sciences of Belarus.

About 200 people study at the Mir State Art Vocational College. And here, too, there is a museum - with a special exposition. Konstantin Petriman, Deputy DIRECTOR for Teaching and Educational Work, shows the graduation theses of graduates - ordinary rural children. The spacious bright hall is lined with products made of wood, clay, straw, and metal.

Konstantin Petriman says that the study of folk crafts helps to better understand the cultural code of the native land:

- It is closely intertwined with the qualities of our people, primarily with multiculturalism. Our ancestors did not reject any of the traditions, they absorbed all the best. The Belarusian code is to rethink other cultures, to combine them with their own customs. Hence - good-neighborliness, tolerance, desire to understand everything.

Another hall in the college is for performances of butleika. On the floor there is a circular diagram with signs: "Rym, Paryzh, Vilnia, Nyasvizh" - the main centers of medieval cultural life, which was influenced by the Radziwills. In the center, naturally, "Mir". The drawing is an enlarged version of the signet from the castle.

Batleyka was revived in Mir in 1988, and in December 2022 it received the status of an element of the intangible cultural heritage of Belarus. Experts have recognized Mir's version as one of the country's most successful attempts to restore a folk theater.

- For 35 years, thanks to the stories of old-timers, enthusiasts and students of the college managed to restore some of the battlefield plots and texts. Three performances from the beginning of the last century were reconstructed: "Gifts", "Kalyadna", "Saldat and the devil", - the deputy director is proud.

Graduates of the Mir College participated in the restoration work in the Mir, Nesvizh, Kreva, Lida castles, in the estate in the capital's Loshitsa, in the restoration of the Peter and Paul Church on Nemiga.

Now there is only one veteran left in the World - Vladimir Bui. He looks much younger than his years - bearing, tenacious eyes, a firm handshake. Meanwhile, Vladimir Danilovich has already turned 96. He jokes: "We have to hobble around for another four years."

The veteran calls the World the cradle from where he stepped into life. Born in the village of Dolginovo, not far from the village. There he met the first day of the war.

- In the morning with the boys grazed cows, suddenly heard explosions: one, the second, the third. Almost immediately, bombers with crosses on their wings appeared from behind the forest. They flew in rows, low, low, over the very trees.

In 1944, when Vladimir turned 17, he was accepted into a partisan detachment. A few classes, and a thin boy became an assistant machine gunner. He took the most terrible battle in his life near the village of Rudma in the Nalibokskaya Pushcha. Punishers with mortars swooped in unexpectedly.

- The machine-gunner Volodya - such a big man - continuously fired, I did not have time to fire machine-gun discs. When I was wounded by shrapnel in my left arm and under the shoulder blade in the region of my heart, I shouted: "I am wounded!" - and he answered: "Disk come on!". Then Volodya suddenly stopped shooting, it killed him.

I rested in a ditch at night, took a machine gun, a rifle, disks, left the encirclement.

After demobilization, Vladimir Danilovich worked hard, for the last 15 years before retirement - at the Krasnoarmeyskaya poultry farm. From 1985 to 1989 - senior sales economist, deputy director. Largely thanks to Vladimir Buy, the enterprise has become a millionaire. Every day, 2-3 cars of eggs went to MINSK.

“I worked from dawn to dusk, traveling all the time,” he admits.

- What is the world for you, a veteran?

- When the war ended, there was a feeling of immense happiness. Even his HEAD was spinning. He thanked fate for being alive. The world is a feeling of freedom, victory, duty done.

- Many republics of the former USSR went through wars after the collapse of the country, but Belarus did not. Why do you think?

- Because we are kind, peaceful, ready to share the last, to come to the rescue. But we will never allow ourselves to be offended.

The poultry farm where Vladimir Bui worked is still operating. There are 160,000 chickens here, a rather large number of cows, which mainly give extra MILK . Work is in full swing in the egg storehouse, shining with cleanliness. Eggs come in a continuous wave along the conveyor. They get to the sorting table, from where they are snatched out by the dexterous hands of workers and placed in lumpy boxes. In six hours, 51,000 eggs are packed here. The poultrymen themselves call the work "hellish", they say that, out of habit, their hands begin to fail after half an hour. Yes, and the knocking of eggs in the workshop is such as if we were at a billiards tournament.

The second large-scale production in the village produces ethyl ALCOHOL, a concentrate of head impurities and kvass wort. The enterprise, founded by Prince Nikolai Svyatopolk-Mirsky in 1896, was originally called modestly - a distillery. Worked only in autumn and winter. The proud name "factory" appeared under the Soviet regime, although in the pre-war years, local craftsmen could only produce 30 liters of rectified spirits per day. Now - 1500 deciliters per day, or 1.5 tons.

From the first distillery there remains a small alcohol storage facility, the foundation of which is made of massive granite blocks, and the doors are decorated with an old patterned lattice. The rest of the rarities were built at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is possible that tourists will start coming to the plant in the near future - a route for them through this territory is being worked out with the employees of the Mir Castle.

The office of Alexander Markevich, the head of the Mir village executive committee, is located on the first floor of a stone house with columns, across the road from the ancient St. Nicholas Church.

- Alexander Leontievich, where do you think the name Mir came from?

- There are five versions. The most plausible, in my opinion, is that peaceful paths converged in this place. And here, "in hiding", people of different nationalities met to resolve differences, even military ones.

- It turns out, a small prototype of modern Belarus?

- Yes. The most peaceful people are worldly. Today, our village is primarily known for the castle, where 140 people work. But there is also a distillery, a poultry farm, a college, a school, a kindergarten. Salaries in the village are decent, so people come here to work from all over the Korelichi district, and from Stolbtsovsky. There are more grocery stores than in many other localities. There are hotels, seven farmsteads, cafes. But the main center of attraction remains the castle, which is actually a city-forming enterprise. It accepts up to 30-40 groups of tourists per day. Today our task is to do the maximum possible to improve people's lives with a minimum budget.

| Alexey GORBUNOV, newspaper "7 days", photo by Pavel ORLOVSKY.

REPRINTING OF THIS MATERIAL (IN WHOLE OR IN PART) OR OTHER USE OF THIS MATERIAL IS PROHIBITED

Read also: